Jingle Dancer
by Cynthia Leitich Smith, Cornelius Van Wright, & Ying-Hwa Hu
Description:
This picturebooks tells the tale of a young girl who wants to compete in the next Powwow with her jingle dance, but she doesn’t have any jingles to add to her dress. She visits women in her community and as she spends time with them and helps them out, she asks to borrow a row of jingles from their dress so that hers will sing. At the end of the book she dances in the Powwow in honour of all of those women who let her borrow jingles and who they themselves were not able to attend. Cynthia Leitich Smith is a member of Muscogee Nation, based in Austin, Texas.
Resource format: Picturebook
Age recommendation: Grade 1 - 4
Keywords: powwow jingle dance, community, powwow, jingle dance, kinship, Muskogee Nation
Year of publication: 2000
Publisher information: Morrow Junior Books
Teaching and Learning Ideas
Our team collaborated with new teachers, alumni of the Werklund School of Education’s Bachelor of Education program, to create teaching and learning plans for texts in this website. With audiences ranging from Pre-Kindergarten to Post-Secondary, lesson plans across this resource address a wide range of school subject areas, inclusive approaches, and Indigenous education topics, such as the revitalization of Indigenous languages. As this website was designed with Undergraduate Programs in Education instructors, as well as teachers in mind, connections to UPE courses have been flagged on each lesson plan. These lessons are intended as a starting place for educators, to help you envision ways in which you might bring Indigenous literatures, as well as ways of knowing, being, and doing, into your teaching contexts. Please adapt, use, and share these lessons in ways that are generative for your teaching practice. We offer our sincere thanks to the dozens of new teachers who gifted us with these creative ideas!
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